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Thursday, 20 September 2012

'Making Fire' by A.L. Berridge

Historical novelists are generally a charitable bunch, but I suspect we each have our one pet subject that brings us out in
historical hives when we see somebody else GET IT WRONG.Mine, I’m afraid, is Fire.

Unfortunately it’s also the subject writers are
most likely to fudge. This particular
rant has been sparked by a scene in a Regency romance where the
protagonists were strolling happily along a country lane – and then the hero ruined everything by lighting a cigar.

'Regency Love' by Dylan Meconis

The poor lovers hadn’t a chance after that. They could flirt
as wittily as they liked, they could even thrash about madly in the bushes, but
I was seeing only the glowing red tip of that cigar and thinking – HOW? How did
he do that? Was he quietly rubbing two sticks together all the time they were
talking? Did he whip out a monocle and catch the rays of the dying sun on his
conveniently pre-charred handkerchief? Was the interesting bulge in his tight
fitting breeches really a tinderbox, and when he set the heroine ‘on fire’ was he doing it literally?

I'm possibly going into geek-overdrive here, but it’s still a worryingly common mistake, even with writers
whose research is otherwise impeccable. I’ve seen medieval heroes escape
captivity with only the clothes they stood up in – and start their life on the
run by making a fire in the woods. I’ve ‘critted’ a manuscript containing a
brilliant description of a seventeenth century bomb – which the villain then
lights by ‘striking’ a match. What is it about this one thing that shuts down
our usual historical instincts and replaces them with a mindset where ‘making fire’ is an easy,
even casual thing, about which nobody thinks twice?

Part of the problem may be that a ‘striking’ match is so ‘low-tech’
it’s hard to believe they weren’t invented until 1826. Another may be simply
linguistic, in that not everyone will realize that the 'match' Guy Fawkes was caught carrying would have been only a length of 'matchcord' - hempen
rope coated to make it ‘hold fire’ once it had been lit by something else.

17th century 'matchcord'

Some of the problem may be visual. Sulphur sticks look like modern matches, they go back
to the sixth century in China and do indeed ‘catch fire’ – but again, they
need to be lit first. Like rope match, these are merely ‘fire-carriers’ rather
than ‘fire-makers’, which is perhaps why even the first successful friction
match was called a ‘lucifer’.

So how did people actually make fire before that?

By a method that takes us right back to the dawn of time –
the friction between flint and steel. No-one knows when the first caveman discovered
sparks could be produced by rubbing flint against iron pyrites, but ‘flint and
steel’ immediately replaced the method of ‘rubbing two sticks together’, and created
a technique we still use to this day.

Honestly – we do. The fuel in this lighter is modern petrol, but the
spark is produced by the action of a little steel wheel on a tiny fragment of
flint. It’s effectively a modern tinderbox.

And the tinderbox is where it really started.

The
ingredients are simple: a ‘steel’ in a bow shape to fit round the knuckles, a
rugged piece of flint, some form of ‘tinder’ (amadou, dry hemp, ‘char-cloth’,
or any other material that will ‘catch’ a falling spark) and either kindling or
a sulphur ‘spunk’ to bring the spark to bloom.

How it works is fairly obvious. It’s deliberately dark, but this little video starts with
the striking of a spark by flint and steel, the catching of it in char-cloth,
and then the transfer by sulphur stick to a beeswax candle.

If you can endure
the whole 90 seconds, you’ll also see a musketeer using ‘slow match’ to ignite
his charge. I’m sorry the fire-making part is
speeded up, but we had to cut out the bits of my husband swearing when he
gashed his knuckles on the flint.

But perhaps I should have left them in – because in reality fire-making
is both slow and difficult. Even
experienced re-enactors can be nervous of making fire at a public demonstration
because it so rarely works first go. That’s what bothers me when historical fiction
gets it wrong – not the lack of technical detail, but the fact that fire-making
is tricky, that tinder could be expensive and hard to find, and that whatever different
technique is used it can’t ever be casual. If we miss that, we’re not slipping
up on a detail, we’re mistaking an entire way of life.

Fire has always been precious, and its original importance
is beautifully illustrated in William Golding’s The Inheritors, which follows
a band of Neanderthals on their summer migration. The ‘old woman’ of the group
carries what is only ever referred to as her ‘burden’, but is in fact a clay
pot containing the fire they need to keep them alive. The impression we have is
that none of them have fire-making skills, and if the fire ever went out they
could never relight it.

The advent of the tinderbox changed all that, but the value of fire persisted through to the 18th century. Once lit,
fires were kept burning forever. At night they would be ‘banked’ for safety,
using a metal hood drilled with tiny holes which the French called a ‘couvre-feu’
– and the English corrupted to a ‘curfew’.

The original ‘curfew call’ had
nothing to do with martial law, but was simply a night-watchman reminding the
citizens it was time to cover their fires for the night.

It sounds wasteful of fuel, but only one fire was needed for
a household, and from that single source would come all the hundred other
usages needed in the course of a day. Burning coals or timber from one fire
would be carried in a bucket to light another. A taper from the fire would light
a lamp or a candle, a spill from the candle would light a pipe or a cigar. That’s
why we never see Mr Darcy or the Scarlet Pimpernel hacking away with their tinderboxes
– the fire is already lit, and all they ever need to do is borrow a little from
an existing flame.

And how important it makes that one fire! For Golding’s
Neanderthals the location of the fire defined their home, and in many ways it still does today. The Romans used the word ‘hearth’ to define a home,
and it still forms the centrepiece for most houses built before 1970.
Central heating has mostly removed the physical need for a fire, but nothing
(for me) compensates for the spiritual loss. I can still remember when a family
sitting room wasn’t arranged around the position of a television, but around something
like this:

Fire transcends its physical properties, which is why our
attitudes to it remained unchanged for so long. The invention of cheap matches
should have done away with most of them, but am I the only one who remembers
seeing on her grandparents’ mantelpiece something that looked like this?

It’s a jar of spills. My grandmother used them to light the
candles, and my grandfather to light his cigars. In Agatha Christie’s The
Mysterious Affair at Styles, a key clue actually depends on the position of a jar of
spills on a mantelpiece. That seems ridiculous
in a novel set during the First World War, but fire was still precious, and
even a match wouldn’t be wasted if there was an existing fire source to be
used.

That’s the mindset we need to hold when we’re writing
historical fiction. I made a whopping great mistake in an early draft of Honour
and the Sword when I had a character light his pipe using a tinderbox – when there
was a fire already lit in the room. After much thought I actually left it in,
because it perfectly illustrated the character’s agitation at the time – but it
still originated in a mistake, and one I was determined not to make again. In
In the Name of the King I had an officer bring his volunteer musketeers a
handful of matches already lit, because it would have made more sense to light
them all from one flame than to hang about while a dozen women all got busy
with tinderboxes.

That’s what I love most about writing historical fiction – getting
inside the heads of long dead characters and seeing a problem as it was in their day. I’ve even learned from it, and when I ran out of matches and was
reduced to that hideously messy business of lighting a cigarette from the gas
cooker, I put on my ‘historical head’ and made a spill out of screwed paper instead.
I used that to light a slow-burning candle, which gave me a light whenever I needed
it for the rest of the night. One fire to light a dozen others.

Or a million. Few or none will remain of those fires that
were once kept burning day and night, but the idea remains and its spiritual
power is as strong as ever. Candles are still lit and kept burning to maintain
a vigil. A torch lit from the Olympic flame is carried hand to hand to keep the
same fire burning all over the world. Unlike ourselves, a fire that is fed will
never die.

Neither will its
history. History for most of us is a broken chain, a series of fragments
connected by gaps. Our landmarks might be those of 1066 And All That, lurching
from the Roman Occupation to the Memorable King Henry VIII with only minor
stops for Alfred to burn the cakes and John to lose his laundry in the Wash.
The landmarks of a specialist can be even wider spread, and my dad had
Victorian Church History at one end and Mediaeval Law at the other with only
the vaguest blur in between.

Fire is different, the universal element that has been with
us all the way. We can follow it through our steel-and-flint lighters to our
grandfather’s spills, through the lucifers of ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ to the
matchlock musket, through the sulphur matches and tinderboxes all the way back
to a caveman rubbing two sticks together and making a spark that would change
the world.

And when we can stand on the edge of that world and see right
back in time to its beginning, then that, for me, is when history itself
catches fire.

Good essay -and so true. Fire lighting is hard! Just noticed this week that Celtic night prayers include asking God to guard the fire. Also was shown a little hatch in the corridor in a house in Shirakawa-go (Japan) where some poor soul had to lie all night to make sure the fire was OK.

Absolutely correct. I've grappled with the fire problem myself in writing the medieval time period. We forget how difficult it was just to stay warm and fed in those days. It was a full time job, and not an easy one.

My favourite mistake in a Regency romantic novel is finding English rivers populated by turtles thanks to one writer's imagination (i'm guessing she lives in America). I dread to think what she did about fire...

Wow! Thank you all so much for these lovely comments. I was a bit worried about this post, because I know no-one here needs to be told any of it, but it was great to be allowed just one little rant.

And Elizabeth - thank you so much for adding those details. I wish I'd known about the Celtic prayer - is it something I can find online? And the Japanese hatch is wonderful. What a very sensible (if inhumane) arrangement - especially if the house was made of paper...

Eve - I love the turtles! You're being very charitable in not naming the book...

Caroline - thank you so much. And I know, those sulphur sticks are so confusing. They look exactly like yellow-headed matches, and the Wikipedia entry definitely implies they could 'make fire'. I absolutely assumed the same as you did at first, and was only saved by a youtube reenactment video showing someone using a sulphur stick to pick up a spark from char-cloth.

Too right. Writing Tudor fiction, I'm constantly obsessing about how they would suddenly have a light/light a fire in a dark forest, for instance, or if they have no hands free for also carrying a lit candle, and have to go to silly lengths sometimes in order to avoid scenes where someone needs a light quickly at three in the morning and then spends twenty minutes kindling one from a tinderbox.

So if you come across one of my scenes with slightly awkward candle or spill-lighting taking place in unlikely circumstances - 'oh, the fire was luckily still smouldering' (at 3am?!) - you'll know why. Thanks for an interesting post.

Lovely post, Louise, thank you. I'm sure I dug up something very like that striking steel in the garden some time back (without knowing what it was). I must see if I still have it. (I'm the sort that is delighted digging up bits of clay pipe or pottery.)

I remember lighting gas stoves years ago using a very simple flint and steel. The handle was a bit of springy steel and you just squeezed it and got a spark. Worked every time. And my grandmother had a jar of spills too!

This is fantastic, Louise. Both erudite and entertaining, as ever. My grandmother used spills to light her gas cooker (from the fire) and my uncle used them to light his pipe (from the gas cooker).

As for the difficulty of starting a fire... I accidentally set a Moleskin book smouldering in my office after leaving a magnifying glass by the window.

Didn't the Greeks and Romans use glass to light fires? Archimedes described using mirrors to set fire to enemy ships. And the Church fathers talk about using a glass vessel filled with water to focus the sun's rays and start a fire.

Wow! Sorry, I went offline for a week and have only just caught up with all these brilliant comments. Thank you so much, everyone.

Anny - you ARE brave doing the 1820s. You'll know a lot more than I do as to how expensive frictions were when they first came out, eg if they were within the reach of ordinary people. A very exciting time.

Victoria - I think we must be sisters. I stress about this kind of thing all the time. At least in Tudor I think it's a pretty safe bet the fire WOULD still be smouldering at 3am and hopefully all night, banked up and covered under a curfew. Still, you often end up with the problem of making your characters go to the kitchen to light a candle!

Adele, Sarah and Sue - thank you so much. I feel a total fraud now, because before I started writing this stuff I wouldn't have batted an eyelid at a Regency matchbook either. It just doesn't seem to be one of those things ever mentioned in school history -yet it affected everything.

Mark - yay for your grandparents! And I do hope you've still got that steel. A genuine fire steel would be a lovely thing to have.

SA - Yes indeed about making fire with glass. The snags are that a) it doesn't work if there isn't any sun (which rules out most historical novels set in the UK for a start), b) for a large chunk of history glass was expensive and unlikely to be carried around naturally, and c) it takes even longer than flint and steel.

But disaster about the Moleskine! I hope it didn't have one of your books written in it...

This particular rant has been sparked by a scene in a Regency romance where the protagonists were strolling happily along a country lane – and then the hero ruined everything by lighting a cigar. Fire Guards

Wonderful post on a subject I was Googling for my own novel...The ancient Zoroastrian religion still has a fire temple in Iran (Yazd Atash Behram) that has a sacred fire which has been burning for over a thousand years! They have beautiful prayers to fire, and names for the different grades of fire-- only the most faithful can approach the highest grades. We take light and heat and flame so for granted now...

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